book details

Foreword by Miguel Leon-Portilla

Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico presents seven dramas from the first truly American theater. Composed in Nahuatl during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of these plays survive only in later copies. Five are morality plays. Presenting Christian views of moral reform, death, judgment, and punishment for sin, they reveal how these themes were adapted into Nahua culture. The other two plays dramatize biblical narratives: the stories of Abraham and Isaac and of the three wise men.

In this volume, Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart offer faithful transcriptions of the Nahuatl as well as new English translations of these remarkable dramas. Accompanying the plays are four interpretive essays and a foreword that broaden our understanding of these rare works.

This volume is the first in a four-volume set entitled Nahuatl Theater, edited by Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart

“Plays are an attractive, integral part of the Nahuatl language corpus, and editors Sell and Burkhart improve radically on all predecessors in their translations and critical apparatus. The transcriptions are virtually definitive.”—James Lockhart, author of The Nahuas after the Conquest, Nahuas and Spaniards, and numerous other works on Nahua history

Barry D. Sell works in the Special Education Department of John Marshall High School, Los Angeles Unified School District, and is coeditor of A Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican Language, 1634. Louise M. Burkhart is Professor of Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University at Albany, SUNY, and is the author of Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico and other works on colonial Nahua religion. Miguel Leon-Portilla is Professor Emeritus of the Institute of Historical Research at the National University of Mexico and the author of numerous books, including Bernardino de Sahagn: First Anthropologist.

printer-friendly version